You can’t win. Here’s why.

Putting the words “Here’s why” in a title is usually click-bait.  People instinctively want to know ‘why’ something. Human curiosity plus the potential bonus of learning something new, and I’m trying to learn something new myself as I go - “if that makes sense” - a phrase one often hears these days, at a time when nothing makes much sense to me.

If you look at Craig’s post a couple of doors down, you’ll see a series of tweets about BBC bias. Peter Oborne’s ludicrous theory is that the BBC edited the audience’s jeering at Boris to minimise it  - because - wait for it - the BBC shills for the Tories. 

To back this up, he cites a thread with the emotive title “Tory Fibs”. Click on it if you want to see a further avalanche of allegations that the BBC is the mouthpiece of the government,  and dishonest to boot.

On behalf of the BBC, Rob Burley is right. He / they / “we” can’t win. 

Well, let me take that back. In one sense he can win - in the battle of the Beeb’s ploy that ‘complaints from both sides’ definitively proves “we must be getting it about right”. When the BBC says it gets complaints from both sides it’s obviously telling the truth. However, this binary factoid alone (if it is really a fact) doesn’t amount to proof that “we must be getting it right. 

(Here's why) Because it depends on the premise from which you start. It hinges on your median. If your median’s out of kilter, so’s everything else.

For example, if your starting point is your own inviolable certainty that the BBC is indeed “getting things right”, then the “complaints from both sides” argument might have reasonable validity. But, on the other hand, if the BBC sees everything through a left-wing prism, which the general consensus is that it clearly does, then no. It’s false. All wrong.

Take Peter Oborne for a start. The BBC sees him as a credible pundit and opinion provider. They have him on programmes like The Week in Westminster, where his booming voice screams “authority.”  But he’s a raging antisemite, an Islamophile and conspiracy theorist.  His hatred for Israel is at the level of  ‘unhinged’. 

Sorry, but when Peter Oborne emotes right-wing conspiracy theory, it is truly bizarre. Search “Tory Fibs”, on Twitter, not only to see all those allegations that the BBC tampered with Boris’s jeering but also for a ‘pile-on’ avalanche of allegations that the man who confronted Jeremy Corbyn with the Ruth Smeeth  / Marc Wadsworth affair was a plant and a serial Q.T. agitator. 

The Twitter mob took an obscenely obvious level of comfort from the fact that they had exposed this man for appearing on Q.T. before in order to ‘smear’ magic grandpa, and although the specific incident he cited took place (if I remember correctly) at the launch of Shami Chakrabarti’s autobiographical, quid pro quo account of the non-existent antisemitism problem in the Labour Party, this event occurred some time ago and there are several more recent incidents he could have cited, this was nevertheless a valid criticism and not a mere smear. 

Next, the BBC is using an ex BBC “Beeboid” called Tom Barton to opine about various election-related matters.  On the ill-fated debate he was of the opinion that “the Audience Won”. Seeing that the audience was stuffed with an increasingly apparent number of left-wing activists, the reality of the audience’s triumph was a matter of opinion. 

*******

Back to the matter of “you can’t win”. You can’t win when your starting point is way off the median.

Sunday morning’s output has a religious bent, which is fine. Whatever floats your boat. But I’m bound to ask, is this country (Britain) no longer considered to be a Christian country? 

I only ask because I think it’s now an Islamo-Christian country. Like Judaeo-Christian, but with Islam instead of Judaeo. Something I heard on the Sunday Programme, Radio 4 this morning tells me this is so. 

The religious programme on BBC One trailed an upcoming item about the full-face veil. 

“What do you think it will say?” asked someone chez Sue. “It will be from the premise that critics of the niqab are racist” I suggested. And so it came to pass.

A walkabout experiment (the equivalent of the infamous kippah experiment) was proposed. A letterbox outfit was duly donned, the premise being that normalising this outlandish uniform was by default “good”.  At no time was this questioned. 

The public, several of whom were already wearing headscarves, barely flinched, apart from one or two people who chose not to respond when approached on the pretext of asking for directions to the station. At least they didn’t say they were pleased she was getting the train to somewhere else. 

When the premise is skewed, you can’t win. The starting point is clear, but where oh where is the finish?